I didn't start OpenConcept because I was interested in business, I started this company because I saw the Internet as being a vehicle of much needed change in our world. So when thinking about the future of my business, I had pretty non-traditional way of looking at growth. My initial inspirations about OpenConcept as a business started around a kitchen table over 15 years ago, and in much of this time has been spent around a kitchen table. What I knew was that progressive organizations needed to be better at collaborating with each other and that open source web tools...

At DrupalCon Austin I was asked by Barry Madore of Triplo to talk about Drupal & Accessibility at TCDrupal 2014. In 2013, a team of people had done some great usability and accessibility work on Drupal 8 at the University of Minnesota . This seemed like an excellent opportunity to follow-up on that. This year Twin Cities Drupal Camp took place from August 7-10. I spent a bunch of my time there in the Awesome Room, which was where the sprints were taking place on Saturday. I couldn't get there in the week unfortunately, but was able to present my...

I was a relatively early adopter of the Internet, having gotten a Bitnet account at the University of Calgary through the Shad Valley program. Of course I'd been involved in BBS 's & Fidonet before this, but that branch of computer networking died when the Internet started to take off. It was exciting to see the range of conversations on Usenet newsgroups , mailing lists and of course through email. I became very involved in exploring what could be done with this technology and in 1990 began approaching non-profits, encouraging them to invest in this technology to help them accompish...

I am presenting at Ottawa's first Accessibility Summit . It's a 20 minute presentation on Fixing Accessibility Problems at the Source which I am using to talk about Drupal's experience trying to meet WCAG 2.0 AA. The slides from this event are available on slides.com , a neat service that works nicely using the open source library reveal.js . I totally loved that I could both edit the HTML directly in the interface and also import/export and host my files wherever I wanted to.For my Accessibility Summit Slides . I am including my notes here as part of this. Hopefully...

Anyone who has been involved Web Accessibility knows that the basics are quite simple, but that it can get complicated really quickly. Training people to create content that can be perceived by people with varieties of sight, hearing, mobility & cognitive challenges is no small task, and ultimately we all make mistakes. Most web content now is being created through Content Management Systems, which are helping to simplify the process of producing content. The future seems to be bright for systems that can manage small chunks of data which are assembled on the fly to give users a personalized experience...

Yesterday we saw profile images get into Drupal.org. This has gotten a bunch of positive feedback as it both modernizes the look of the community and addresses a style bug that goes back to 2010 when the last design (Bluecheese) was applied to the site. More importantly though it puts a face on the contributors of the d.o community -- we are no longer just anonymous blue nicknames ! The styling changes on Drupal.org are a nice improvement, mostly because it is a regular reminder about the individuals who are pushing to make Drupal better. Hopefully when we see the...

This was a more in-person presentation about web accessibility issues in general.&nbsp; We showcased some general issues and facilitating a bit of a discussion to raise awareness. We welcomed people from different backgrounds, including government services, universities and design agencies. The topic was addressed to a non-technical audience to raise awareness on accessibility. Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) began pretty well this year for us. I started by participating in Inclusive Design 24 (#ID24) with a 7am presentation. For those who missed it the talk live, a recording should be available soon. In the interim, I quickly posted the presentation...

Yes, all of the attention is on Drupal 8. D8, will be amazing! It totally makes sense that when folks talk about Core development that they think about the latest version. Sometimes though it seems that we forget that there are two stable releases with hundreds of thousands of sites using them for every development version of Core. If this proposal gets accepted, which I think it will, there will 3 supported releases of Core for a few months when the Drupal 9 branch is started. So we know when Drupal 8 is released that there will still be 3-4...

Back in 2007, Russell McOrmond , Phillip Smith and myself decided to set up a service for the Canadian NGO community to make it easier to match individuals with their elected officials. It seems like a pretty basic component of any effective democracy, but it still isn't something that is available to Canadians. At the time, Statistics Canada offered a database of postal codes to riding associations. For $3000 you could buy a database on a CD and have the rights to buy updates every year. The license allowed us to resell access to the database through an API (Application...

We are always looking for ways to become a better business. We have always strived to meet the needs of our clients and staff in a cost effective and environmentally friendly fashion. Last year we started the process of becoming a Certified B Corporation , as it seemed to fit well within the work we've done in the past decade. It was a very interesting process and raised many issues that we hadn't considered previously, which would expand the impact we can have as a business. It is really empowering to be part of a movement that is working to...